Tuesday

Creative Expressions of Poetry and Art: What This Blog Is About

Creativity does not thrive in a vacuum and it is best when shared. Therefore, I have decided to use this blog to share my poetry and art with a wider audience that I may otherwise never have reached. Thank-you for visiting my blog and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy creating it.In this post I have outlined a little bit of what you can expect to find in this blog. However, creativity is an ongoing, dynamic process so quite frankly expect to find anything. Having said that here are a few things that you will find in this blog.

My Artistic and Writing Style

Dear reader I would like to state from the start that rules constrain my creativity so I do not use them.My writing and art style is all about freedom and I write, paint and draw what comes to mind. I like to retain what I feel is the flow of the art piece and rules interfere with this. You will find that the writing style in this blog is conversational and the art and poetry style do not necessarily fit any conventions. My poetry can best be described as free verse and if you look at the rules guiding that poetic style my poetry still falls outside of it. Some of my poetry may also be described as ekphrastic (see the next section for more on that). My art does not fit perfectly into any particular genre. I do love nudes, vibrant color and some of the art masters such as Picasso and Matisse so you may find that my artwork is influenced by that. However, basically I write and draw what I like and I would encourage any of my creative readers to do the same.

Ekphrasis and Poetry Art: My Chosen Media for Creative Expression

Dear reader you may be wondering what ekphrasis is and perhaps I should have defined it right from the start however, I did not want to scare off my readers with Greek words and technical terms :-). Since this blog will contain a number of creative works that use ekphrasis I might as well go ahead and define it for you. The term ekphrasis is drawn from the Greek language, it comes from the words ek (out) and phrasis (speak) which literally translates to speak out. It is also drawn from the verb ekphrazein which means to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name. In simple terms the word ekphrasis is usually defined as a description. In artistic terms, ekphrasis refers to a stylistic device in which an artist uses one art-form to describe another art-form. So for example, an artist may use poetry to describe a painting. This poetic style of writing is referred to as ekphrastic poetry. The description can be graphic e.g. an ekphrastic poem may actually describe the colors and figures in the painting or it may tell a story about the poet’s interpretation of the art piece. This blog will have a few examples of ekphrastic poetry, in some cases both the poem and the art piece will be by me and in other cases I may use the work of other artists. The simpler, less-known term for the artistic style that I use in this blog is poetry art. Poetry art is an art-form that allows the artist to combine both poetry and a visual work of art within a single art piece. The dual nature of poetry art is perfect for me since I enjoy both writing poetry and creating visual works of art. Not all poetry art is ekphrasis since not all of it is poetry that describes a visual art piece. In some examples you may find I have simply combined a visual art piece and a poem to form one work of art that illustrates something. Most of my artwork in this blog will fall into the poetry art category.

Support and Resources for Poets, Artists, Writers and Other Creative Types

I realize that some of you reading this blog may be my fellow artists or people who have an interest in the creative process. Therefore, I would like to cater for this section of readers as well. Once in a while I will be writing posts on the creative process that I hope will be of assistance to readers. I will also be adding resource links to the sidebar of this blog so you can look there once in a while to see if there is anything of interest to you. It is my hope that this blog will be a source of support and inspiration for people to explore their own creativity. On that note I will end this post. Let us embark on this journey of creative expression together.